The Road

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The Road

Named one of the four major novelists of his time, Cormac McCarthy has won numerous awards such as the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2009 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, which places him in the highest rank of American literature. His tenth and latest novel, The Road (2006), known as his most traumatic yet intensely personal work, has won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature Award in 2007, as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (2007,) and the Quill Book Award (2007.) The Road is one of three novels that have been made into a film and was featured in theaters in 2009. Nominated for various cinematography awards, and winner of the Pulitzer Award, The Road is a profoundly shocking in-depth way at looking at the flailing annihilation of the human civilization.

The Road is a post-apocalyptic story of a journey taken by a father, the man, and his young son, the boy, “each the other’s world entire” (McCarthy, p. 6). The man and boy, sustained by love, travel through bleak and grim America some years after an immense unexplained cataclysm destroyed nearly all humanity, and environment. The land is covered in ash, is extremely dark, and cold with recurrent rain, gray snow, and earthquakes. Throughout the novel the boy calls the man “Papa,” and they both refer to themselves as the “good guys” who carry the fire; “the “bad guys” being other human survivors who have turned cannibalistic. The man, haunted by dreams and reminiscent due to flashbacks of his childhood and his wife who committed suicide at the time of the world-wide destruction, protects his son from starvation and attacks, even though he himself realizes that he is dying. Both father and son rumma...

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.... Looking at these effects, it is obvious that they revolve around how the intestate demise of the world affected humanity. The journey the man and the boy traveled through depressing America in truth unlocks the reality of a Judgment Day. All of us come from unpredictable societies, and unfortunately we poison all we come in contact with, and simply don’t care when it comes to our environment. “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was” (McCarthy, p. 32)? This quote gives an idea of what kind of catastrophe might have struck the world, and that the prophets are gone, taking the world with them. Whatever happened to humankind in the novel, The Road, was completely destroyed along with the moral principles that man and the boy, even we value.

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